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TWENTY-FOUR

  The house wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, except of course that the door had been padlocked and the windows boarded over. ‘NO TRESPASSING’ had been spray painted in tall red letters on each piece of plywood. It had once been green with white trim, but the elements had stripped it of most of its color. Weeds and dead grass stood waist high all around, boxes and bottles and discarded waste littered the property. Its backyard was sixteen acres of open field.

  Was it haunted? Back then I thought so. Jason and Cory thought it might be. Steve had his doubts.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t look like your typical haunted house. You’d figure for a place to have spooks residing in it, it would have to be a three story mansion, have belfries, an old, dead oak tree out front, iron gates leading up the drive and a permanent full moon suspended in the sky above it. But this house was just like the houses we lived in, maybe a decade older. It had three bedrooms, two baths and a garage that was part of the house itself.

  I wasn’t so much afraid to be around it. Hell, we walked past it on our way to school. But being inside of it certainly wasn’t on the top of my list of things to do. I knew there wouldn’t be any electricity on in that house. The windows had big pieces of plywood nailed to them to restrict access, which meant it would be pitch black inside. It had been empty for as long as I could remember, for as long as any of us could, so who knew what kind of creepy crawly things lived within its dark mass. I don’t even want to get started on spiders.

  And then there were the ghosts to think about. For years, stories of the house and the spirits that dwelt there were passed along from kid to kid around our neighborhoods and through our school. The most popular story being that the first year the house was built, a young couple moved in; the perfect couple. He was a firefighter, she a homemaker, working on their first baby. Well, nine months after they bought the house, low and behold, a miracle happened. She had managed to get pregnant and once she learned of the good news, she wanted to immediately share it with her husband who was on duty at the station just a mile and a half up Magnolia from the house. She called and told him to come home quick; she had something very special to tell him.

  But a few minutes later when he did arrive home, he found his lovely wife in a pool of blood at the bottom of the back steps, barely alive. A laundry basket lay next to her, overturned, soaking up the gore.

  It seemed that as she was waiting for her hubby to get home, she decided to hang some clothes on the line outside to dry, and on her way down the steps, missed one and took a header into an old glass coffee table they had set aside to throw out.

  Well, when the man came strolling up calling out to his wife and getting no answer, he started to worry. He went from room to room but found nothing. Then he finally went through the kitchen and saw the back door opened. Slowly he crept closer and closer, calling out her name until finally he saw her lying at the bottom of the steps, bloodied and dying.

  He rushed out the door and to his wife. He saw the blood and the broken table that she had been harpooned by. It was the same table she’d been nagging him to get rid of for the last two months. He bent low, knelt next to her and cradled her head in his lap. He’d cried and shook.

  Two large shards of glass jutted from her torso, one from her left breast and one from her belly. Her face no longer looked the same. It had been rearranged by glass, opened and split. She had on a mask of blood and where the right eye should have been, there was what looked like a peeled tomato.

  With her good eye fixed on him she tried to smile but her bottom lip was missing. She tried to speak.

  “Sa-“ she swallowed hard and then puked red. “Save-“

  Shhh, he told her. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll save you, sweetheart.

  She shook her head slowly, blinked her good eye, and in a gurgled whisper, tried again.

  “Save the baby.”

  Then her eye closed.

  Then her breathing ceased.

  Then her heart stopped.

  The husband realized at that moment what the good news was that she had called him about. She had finally conceived. They were going to have a child.

  Were.

  In shock of his wife’s death and the news of the pregnancy, he rocked his head back and yelled to the sky, holding his wife’s lifeless head, a flock of doves exploded into flight.

  It was his fault. If he had just done what she had asked and got rid of the damn table, she would be still alive. Her and the baby just starting to grow inside her. But from his laziness, he had now lost his wife and a child.

  Then, obvious to him, after his tears stopped falling and his voice went horse, there was only one thing he could do.

  He was a firefighter, responsible for saving peoples lives. But he couldn’t save the life of the most important person in his world. In fact he felt he was the cause of her death.

  So he picked up her gashed and lifeless body and carried it inside as if it were a small child that had fallen asleep. He took her and laid her gently on the bed that they once shared but never would again. Then he went into the garage, in a daze, to get the gas can and a length of rope. The can was only half full, the rope only four feet long but they would both do their jobs all the same.

  When he got back to the bedroom he leaned over the bloody body and kissed her tacky top lip.

  “I love you,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ll see you soon.”

  He upended the can and the stinky, blue fluid spilled down on her body below. When he was done he threw the gas can through the window to make sure enough oxygen could get into the room. But before he lit the match he took the rope and a chair into the closet. He tied one end around a rafter and made a loop at the other end, slipped his head through.

  With the box of stick matches, he lit one and threw it at his wife’s body. It went out before it landed on the bed. He tried again and failed again. By the third try he had realized that all he needed to do was light the whole box. He did this, and threw the fireball at the bed.

  His dead wife went whumph in a ball of flame and he stepped off the chair, choking and watching the pyre before him, until death took him too.

  And the strange thing was (and this is the part where the kid telling the story adds a little emphasis), the house didn’t burn down from the fire. Instead, when the fire department showed up (the same one the husband had worked at), they found the wife’s body on the bed, charred and smoldering but nothing else in the room had burned or even scorched. They also found the husband-their former compatriot-hanging in the closet, eyes bulged out, staring at his wife’s remains.

  The end.

  Yeah, it was pretty stupid and it was only child legend.

  But on quiet nights, you were supposed to be able to here the moans of a woman saying, “Save my baby. Save my baby.” A man’s sobbing voice could be heard as well.

  Standing outside of that house was one thing, going inside was another and I had no plans on doing the latter anytime soon. I would have to build up plenty of courage before stepping one foot inside.

  Steve, Jason, Cory and I circled the place slowly, the other boys trying to find a breach in its hull, pulling and pushing on the plywood. I hung back, searching the grounds for discarded treasures; which there was plenty of, if you considered trash a treasure.

  After a few more minutes we had come full circle back to the front of the house where Steve went up to try the thick wooden door. It was all in vain though, even from my vantage point I could see the thick padlock and latch denying access.

  To my relief they gave up any hope of trying to find a way in, today at least, and we walked back through the tall, brown grass and crossed over Fullerton, heading out into the field where the Tree stood.

  Steve took the folded newspaper out of his back pocket, tapped each of us on the head and said, “Race ya’,” and started running for our new fort.