Seriously, the place looked like the joint in HELL HOUSE: sprawling, garrets, high arched doorways, narrow windows, and old brick walls with ivy growing in the seams. Cool. I’m not sure what it used to be, but I think it was some sort of seminary or religious school.) Back to the story: my friends and I brought three tape recorders. Two were cassettes and one was a big reel to reel with, like, four hours of tape on it. Were merely placed the recorders in strategic locations, turned them on, and retreated to a back room and fooled around with an Ouija Board for a few hours. (The mystical oracle yielded no results.) Then, later on, we collected the tapes and recorders and left the house. The reel to reel and one of the cassettes had absolutely nothing on them but the second cassette did indeed record some voices. These are the voices in my poem, and one of them, the one we labeled "Voice C," is what gave Tom the idea for his excellent story. It was a wan female voice that sounded distant yet somehow very close up at the same time. The voice uttered these two words: "I’m dead."
I'm not bullshitting, I swear! And anyway, that's the story. And I'm delighted that Tom found this little oddment interesting enough to write a story about, a superb story to say the least.
The house is still there, by the way, and anytime I revisit Maryland, I toy with the idea of sneaking a tape recorder inside and making another remote recording. I’m certain, in fact, that one day I will.
–Edward Lee, author of
FLESH GOTHIC
and
MESSENGER
J
enks averted the cold spot in front of the foyer closet as he stepped into the house where his sister had been murdered.
He hadn't expected a media frenzy and there wasn't one. Two reporters from the yellow journal city papers, a small crew from the local cable station, and that was it. The girl's mother, Mrs. Mallory, was doing all the talking, trying to nail down her moment in the spotlight. Her hair had been done up in a carefully constructed tower of braids and tails that threatened to topple starboard. The new dye job hadn't completely taken at her temples and it appeared that she'd tried to trim out the offending grays.
She sat on a worn couch which was clearly set for the trash, large boxes stacked up before her being used as a coffee table. Paper cups and plates with half eaten slices of pizza littered the top. A couple of fold-out chairs encircled her and the two reporters were sitting, scribbling haphazard notes, looking weary as hell.
The girl, Tracy, sat silently beside her mother with the micro-cassette tape recorder in her lap, eyeing the device with a mixture of disinterest and loathing. It was an odd fusion but she pulled it off.
No one had noticed Jenks yet. He glanced around the nearly empty room. The house had gone through some changes in recent years but nothing too extreme. At some point the family had broken out a section of the far wall and put in a glass atrium. Jenks imagined they'd kept ferns and potted palms, maybe some Easter lilies in there surrounding a wicker breakfast set. It was the kind of room Jenks' mother would've liked two decades ago, back when his family had been living here.
1529 Baldwin Boulevard.
Even seeing the numbers on the mailbox made his heart rate pick up. The 'For Sale' sign planted on the lawn had tilted in the heavy wind, and the dead leaves swept over the front yard and piled into calf-high drifts. The neighborhood had been going to shit over the last few years but you just didn't notice it that much in the autumn.
He stepped farther into the living room. Nobody looked up.
They asked Tracy to play the tape for them once more. She didn't appear to want to. She wasn't nervous or even greatly annoyed, just detached, the way most teenagers seem to feel about everything.
Tracy Mallory had a round face framed by coiling lengths of blonde corkscrew curls.
Little fresh girl pout with full peach lips. She had some meat to her, spread out in the right places, and she dressed to jiggle and bounce in a tight lace blouse, no bra, patched bell-bottom jeans. Boys would already be going berserk over her, wrestling each other in the halls for her attention. In three years she'd be voluptuous. In twenty, after a couple of kids, she'd be bloated and eyeing liposuction ads, busting the hump of her insurance agent to cover it as a health necessity.
When Tracy refused to play the recording again her mother took it from her lap, fumbled with the buttons, popped the tape, stuck it back in, rewound but not far enough.
He heard his sister's voice clearly. She sounded excited, anxious, with a hint of hostility. "What's that? Give it to me!"
He'd heard those exact words perhaps a hundred times since he was eight.
The story was getting older every day. Whenever someone else took over the house and wound up getting something on tape, the voices always said the same damn thing. Jenks was a bit surprised that anybody still cared. Maybe it was the season. Next October would be the twenty-year anniversary, and he'd heard that a documentary for some Halloween special on the History Channel was in the works.
He'd been eight years old when his sister had been raped and beaten to death, dragged through the house and left in the yard while his parents attended his second grade chorus recital. Her boyfriend, a grease monkey small-time coke dealer named Sonny Meeker, had been hounded by the cops for months, but they'd never been able to make anything stick. Even as a boy Jenks believed Meeker had killed his sister, and he'd sat in the darkness of his bedroom planning to someday prove it. But a few years later Meeker had turned up floating in Lake Ronkonkoma with four .22 bullets in his eyes. It was gratifying but not quite enough.
Mrs. Mallory figured the recorder out, rewound it to the beginning and played what he'd heard so many times before.
VOICE A: "The kid's over there."
VOICE B: "What?"
VOICE C: "Give it back. It's mine!"
VOICE B: "Hello? Hello?"
VOICE A: "The girl's dead. Don't."
VOICE C: "Give it to me!"
VOICE A: "Who is that?"
VOICE B: "What?"
VOICE A: "Hello?"
VOICE C: "
Shh
…he'll hear you."
VOICE A: "What?"
VOICE B: "Tell me your name."
VOICE C: "That's my brother. I need him. Get him."
Jenks' chin snapped up. Christ. His back muscles tightened and a film of sweat broke on his forehead. He sucked air through his teeth and said, "Play it once more, please."
Everybody turned, including the cameraman, swinging his lights over onto Jenks. They all recognized him-even Tracy-and were instantly bored with him. Still, they'd be inclined to ask a few questions, the same ones they always hit him with.
Mrs. Mallory drew some of the looping hair from in front of her eyes and punched rewind again. Pressed play. She leered at nothing while she listened, neck crooked to balance her do. One of the reporters stretched in his seat and did a poor job of covering a yawn.
They hadn't done their homework. They didn't realize the voices weren't exactly the same this time around.
"Thank you," Jenks said.
The cable channel correspondent came over doing her best to feign interest, ashen eyes threaded with red, edges of her nostrils a little too pink. She'd probably asked to use the bathroom at least twice in the past hour to sniff a couple pinches. As she got closer he realized she was pretty and pixie-
ish
but most of the cutie-pie looks were drawn on with heavily applied make-up. He figured she had about another six months on TV before they gave her the hook.
She didn't bother to introduce herself, just said, "Channel Twelve News" and launched into the inquisition. Good, get it over with. She continued buffeting him with the lusterless questions they'd been asking for years, and though he gave carefully prepared replies there simply weren't any answers to go around. The amiable grin went dry and caked on Jenks' face, and his irritation continued growing minute by minute. He kept a polite front until the cable chick, with enough wax on her lips to fill a candelabra, asked him, "Do you still miss your sister?"
Sometimes they wanted too much and the fist closed tightly on his heart. Jenks let his own hollow smile drop as he leaned toward her until they were nearly nose to nose. She backed up a few feet and moved directly into the cold spot. There were three of them throughout the house that he knew about. The color drained from her face and she shuddered so violently that her back teeth snapped together and her elbows popped. The cameraman and sound guy, afraid of what might happen next, both slung the equipment off their shoulders and braced themselves.
Jenks said, "On occasion."
Easy enough. He turned and walked into the living room, where the girl was finishing up a piece of pizza. Her eyes were on him, and she was waiting.
T
he reporters left without a word to him, and the cable crew slid out the front door en masse, murmuring.
Jenks introduced himself to Mrs. Mallory and sat. They'd spoken only briefly on the phone but she'd been friendly. Thrilled, really, and he could understand why-how wild it was to become a part of the urban myth culture.
Now she spent a minute on pleasantries, offering him coffee, diet coke, sesame seed bagels, and apologizing for the busted couch springs. After that they hit the usual barrier of silence. He'd found there was nothing he could ever say to help anybody get through it. They had to come around on their own, get used to the idea of what they were really talking about in front of him. His murdered sister.
Finally she was ready, perked in her seat and said, "Well, Mr. Jenks, we've been here in the house for six years. Of course, we've played the tape recorder game several times."
"Sure."
"On Halloween, the way you're supposed to."
He nodded. "According to the legend."
"Right, that's why we did it. Just to see."
"Everyone who's lived in this house after my family has done the same."
It got her wondering and she asked, "How many have there been? Owners since you moved away."
"Five, including yours."
She pulled a face, gave the wide eyes. "I didn't realize there had been so many. Five in twenty years, that's a lot. Nothing ever happened to us, I mean, no noises or apparitions. No flies or blood in the tub, those things like the papers in the checkout line say."
"No one's ever experienced anything like that. Just the voices on tape."
"That's what we've always heard. The stories."
She'd been doing all right up until then, meeting his eyes and conversing without becoming disconcerted. Then the sheepish quality began to soak in.
"About my sister," he said.
"Yes, but like I told you, nothing ever happened before when we did the game. Now, my God, those women…they're so miserable and forlorn."
Jenks didn't agree. To him, they sounded rather petulant, edgy, crazed.
"Why'd you play the game last week?" he asked.
The hairdo was really bothering the shit out of her. Mrs. Mallory kept running her hands across the side of her head trying to push ropes of braids back in place, tie them off so she'd get some equilibrium back. "My husband got a promotion and we're moving to Westchester. I suppose Tracy wanted to try one more time before we left."
He looked at the girl and she cocked her chin at him, clucked her tongue as if daring him to shake her deliberate apathy. Jesus, talk about forlorn.
"Were you alone, Tracy?"
The kid switched gears. The huffy touchiness ran deep in her, and now she threw it way out there. Pursing those broody lips, her gaze was suddenly filled with a sexual wickedness and immature cruelty. "It was just something to do. My boyfriend was over and he's the one who brought it up."
"He's into the occult, that one," her mother added.
"Frankie is not. Just because he wears black and likes horror movies doesn't mean he's into worshiping Satan."
"I didn't say he worshiped Satan, just that he's interested in those kinds of things."
"Was it his recorder?" Jenks asked. "Your boyfriend's?"
"No." Tracy nailed Jenks with that glare again, working it some. Not a seduction exactly, just another way to make somebody uncomfortable. It was starting to piss him off. "I have this tiny voice-activated micro machine one...well, it's my fathers, but I use it most of the time. I write poetry and carry it around in my purse sometimes. You know, I speak bits of verse into it. I suppose he was curious about the stupid legend, so I left it on record Saturday night when Frankie and I went out to the Burger Emporium. He's read all the books on our house, really dug the idea that, you know, that something might happen. Spirits and shit. When we came back, I saw that some of the tape had run. And there they were. Those ladies."